About
For the past eighteen years, Helen Rennie has been teaching cooking classes for home cooks in her house. It all started with fish. When she first arrived in Boston after college in 2000, she was fascinated by all the fish species unfamiliar to her at the time. She taught herself to cook them and ended up teaching a fish cooking class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. At the end of class, a student told her how much he’s learned and asked her to do the same for meat. She didn’t know much about meat, but promised him she’d investigate. A restaurant internship, and many steaks and roasts later, a meat class was born. The requests kept coming: vegetables, pasta, pies, sauces! Each time, Helen interned in a restaurant, read everything she could get her hands on, cooked something a hundred times, and designed a class. While most cooking classes were offering an alternative to a dinner out: appetizer / entree / dessert, Helen was offering an alternative to a restaurant internship. Her in-depth, geeky way of teaching garnered her a real following in the Boston area, and in 2005 Helen opened Helen’s Kitchen Cooking School in her home kitchen.
Fourteen years ago, a student in the knife skills class asked if Helen could make a little video to refresh students’ memory on how to dice an onion. This was the infancy of YouTube - the time before our phones shot video. Making videos was hard back then, but Helen is not one to say no to a challenge. That’s how her YouTube channel was born. In 2017, she won YouTube’s Next Up contest for up-and-coming channels and got to spend a week in NYC learning about video production. She has since made hundreds of videos on many cooking techniques and has grown her audience to 550K subscribers. Having a wider audience gave her more feedback on her recipes. As a former usability engineer, she is a strong believer in user testing, and it brings her great joy to continuously improve the clarity, ease, and deliciousness of her recipes.
When she is not teaching or making videos, Helen is most likely on a tennis court or prowling Boston (or some other city) with her husband and 2 children in search of a perfect croissant.